# Sahil Lavingia Gets Radically Honest

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXJvxYp-OQ8
Duration: 1 hr 17 min
Language: English
Words: 16286
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/zXJvxYp-OQ8

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[0:00] All right, so Sahil Lavingia I actually just want to catch up with you, to be honest. And before we started this call, you were saying how excited you are for 2023. Why are you excited? Yeah, I mean, I I love change. Uh and you know, there's a great book by Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, which kind of goes into this concept of you know, there there are certain things that get more resilient as as you shake them up, and then there are other things that completely break, right? There's

[0:31] sort of fragile things and antifragile. And antifragile is kind of this interesting concept because it's not just like it doesn't get worse, you know, at a at a at it's sort of, you know, better at staying good. No, it actually improves in chaotic kind of environments, right? So, like evolution, you know, things like that. Um the human body, the human brain, like these adaptive systems. Um and I just really try to run Gumroad, my venture stuff, like everything that I do in a very antifragile way, where basically everything can kind of go to zero. Um and I will outperform the competition in that way. Um and so, I'm just I'm

[1:08] anytime there's like any real risk or change in the environment ecosystem, whether that's COVID, leaving COVID, pan- whatever it is, I'm I just I get super psyched. Um it's frustrating. I think the last 2 years have been frustrating for for for people like me who like to build stuff because they're just you weren't you weren't really rewarded as much for that. Uh and I think this year, next year, it's going to hopefully it'll be it'll be much more valuable to to actually build valuable things, right? Um and I I'm confident that I know how to do that. Uh and so, that's kind of why I'm excited

[1:42] is I guess, you know, like the tides the tide is very quickly going out. Uh and I have no concerns about that, you know? Uh so, uh I'm I'm excited. Do you think there's going to be more builders now or less builders? There'll definitely be less. Less builders. Um as a percent it'll go up, right? Because you're going to see tons of people who who who don't identify as builders leaving the ecosystem. I consider these people like tourists basically who got in when it was like really sexy. Um but like are gone already frankly, right? Um they they

[2:12] pieced out like in January of this year. The first couple quarters. Uh But I think I think even the builder persona is is going to shrink too, right? Where there are lots of people and the reason is because builders are also relatively rational people and and sort of factor in risk quite significantly. Most builders are not risk seeking at all, right? So when you look at founders like the founder personality type, you have to overlay so many things that are like in the minority uh to get someone like a Patrick Collison or a Dylan Field or a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk or whatever, right? You

[2:46] have to overlay quite a few things. Um And and so I think a lot of builders who are not you know, who are doing the math for example and saying, "Hey, Robinhood being 80 billion makes me want to start a company, but Robinhood being worth 4 billion doesn't make me want to start a company." There are a lot of people that that that make those kinds of decisions and will say, "Hey, you know, I'm actually going to go work at

[3:08] Amazon or Facebook or Google instead." Also like Robinhood being worth 4 billion but having 4 billion on cash on hand, right? And to me, I mean to be honest like it's irrelevant. I really don't care. Like I did not build stuff because there was money to be had in building stuff. Like when I started making iPhone apps when I was like 15 years old, this was before, you know, Instagram and Snap and Uber even. Like one of the first things I built was like an Uber basically call a cab on your phone app. But I just did it to solve my own problem. Like I didn't

[3:41] think about it like, "Oh wow, there's like we can completely reinvent transportation or something like that, right?" And so for me it's like cool. Like engineers are cheaper, or easier to hire. Um designers are cheaper, easier to hire. Uh, and that's all I need. I don't actually don't need anything else. Um, those are the two most valuable, you know, resources on the planet. Uh, and now they're, you know, they're sort of two to three times cheaper than they were like six months ago, which is amazing, you know? I would say the only other thing I'm waiting to crash and the only other thing I'm super excited about

[4:11] is to hope that is I hope interest rates continue to climb and I hope that stock prices continue to get crushed. I hope that housing uh, gets destroyed completely. You know, like I I would love to be able to buy a house in San Francisco, you know, for $200,000 and I think that's possible. Um, but it's going to take, you know, 10 plus percent interest rates. So, that's what I want. Like fingers crossed. Um,

[4:32] we'll see what happens. And where are you spending a lot of your brain power think, you know, thinking about it? You know, are there particular industries or ideas that you can share that, you know, are on your mind? Yeah, I mean, obvi you know, the big one that everyone's talking about these days is AI, right? Um, so I think that's that's that's pretty interesting. Um, I don't think it's as notable as people It's I don't think it's a step function increase, for example. I think we've been basically seeing this gradual thing happening, which is we take work that is

[5:03] valuable, but wrote, and automate it. And we've been doing this for a long period of time. Like I would say the largest example of this is open source software, right? So, I can build a new product that really to build the product, it's hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Uh, but I only have to

[5:19] write two to 300 lines of code, right? Because I'm able to basically like abstract away all of the complexity to uh, you know, open source software. And so, I think AI is just basically like that, but for like language that is just much more probabilistic and less deterministic, right? Language is not as it's not math, right? It's It's It's It's actually like there's It is relative, right? When you learn a language, you're kind of learning how all the words connect to each other, but there's like nothing outside of it, which is like super strange, right? You don't learn from like a base level of knowledge and build

[5:49] up. You kind of piece things together at like a puzzle. Um which makes no sense. Like the the reason that that works is cuz we humans came up with it, right? Nature didn't come up with it. Uh so it's not great. Um But yeah, I I I I just look at basically all of these different kinds of jobs, basically any job in which your output

[6:07] is digital. Um you know, I I see that that that will kind of be replaced with basically uh a computer predicting what that human would be outputting. Um and I think a lot of my brainpower right now is spent on basically reading up on these papers. Uh like right now I'm reading up a paper on this it's called fusions of it's called fusions of consciousness, I think. Just came out

[6:29] today. Um but basically we're learning a lot of stuff about neuroscience, about the brain, about intelligence, about neurons, and how they work. And you know, it's sort of the last problem because if you can figure that out, then like you you know, it's kind of like what Google says, like you figure out how to solve the information problem and then you you can solve every other problem with with the information problem, right? Like every everything else is is a is a problem of lack of

[6:50] information. Um lack of understanding the patterns, right? Like magic is just like definitively when you don't know what the math is. It looks like magic. If you understand the math, then it's not magic, right? And one of the amazing things about this new wave of AI, which I think started in about 2017, is transformers. Transformers and now diffusion models. But basically the the transformers are are at least to me very very cool, very awesome because before if you wanted to understand a lot of these concepts, there's a lot of other things there are a lot of things you have to piece together to figure out like, okay, what is intelligence? How

[7:23] does this thing work? Transformers are super simple. Like it's kind of shocking how simple they are. I think they were invented in like the '70s with the perceptron. Uh but basically you're just looking at noise and signal and then you're trying to draw patterns between the noise and the signal. And what that means is as long as you have enough data, you can kind of apply this problem to anything. There's nothing that I said there that is domain specific. Whereas, for example, at Gumroad, we have a risk model at Gumroad, right? Every purchase that goes through kind of and it looks at all of these, you know, hundreds and

[7:57] hundreds of feature flags. And like a human had to come in and say, "Okay, we should have a rule that, you know, looks at like the the letters in their email and, you know, kind of creates a model, you know, a tiny model based on like is it asdf@gmail.com? Probably fraud, right? Or whatever, right? And like you basically build these hundreds of rules and then you have this sort of tree function and then it kind of does this thing, it comes back with a risk score saying, "Hey, you know, based on what we've seen in the past, you know, like or and what humans think looks risky or not, right? And and

[8:31] basically just get rid of that and humans think, right? And you just say, "Based on what we've seen in the past, is this risky or not?" And if you think about how little code is actually required to do that, it's almost nothing. It's like a few dozen lines of code. So, what it means in practicality is that a startup like Gumroad or really an indie developer can now compete with the YouTube on YouTube recommendations, which 4 years ago or even 2 years ago

[8:55] would not have been the case, right? Basically, Gumroad could not have really entered the discovery. We had to kind of outsource it to Twitter and Facebook and you and, you know, all these other services cuz there's just no way that a tiny company could do recommendations at scale. Um what we're at now, I see the problem and I'm like, actually, you know, I plan a tweet tomorrow that we we want to hire one ML engineer who to basically build recommendations for Gumroad. Like, I don't think it'll take more than one person. Um and that's amazing, right? I mean, like to to think about like, you know, the

[9:26] hundreds of people that would have been required to build a model like this maybe 5 to 10 years ago and did at YouTube before uh before their new stuff, right? But now, I mean, it's it's a 10 or 100X. And so, when I look at AI, like AI is automating 99 of those engineers. Right now, I only need one. Um and so, it's funny cuz people think all of these other jobs are getting automated away, but the number one job that's getting automated away is actually the software engineering job, right? Like why is software engineering such a valuable skill? It's because we've automated the crap out of it so

[9:56] that the people who are still able to do it are insanely highly leveraged, right? Like I built Gumroad in a weekend. And, you know, like obviously we built stuff on top of that, but the core stuff took about 20 hours, right? And today it would probably take about 4 hours or something, right? Because I would use ChatGPT to write, you know, the majority

[10:16] of the code. And so, that I mean, that that I think is pretty pretty pretty pretty amazing. I think it'll be a a while until we get to hardware. Like but but the cool thing about the whole transformer model is in in a sense, you can apply it to hardware, right? You can apply it to real-life experiences. And so, imagine that as long as you have enough cameras watching what humans are doing, just like you have, you know, you know, you you record all the text that gets inputted when you buy a product on Gumroad, imagine if you have cameras everywhere recording all this stuff and

[10:48] then, you know, you can totally automate tons and tons of stuff. Um it's pretty fascinating. I mean, I think I think we could see, for example, my guess is 10 15 years from now, we'll start, you know, we'll we'll be watching robots play soccer instead of humans because you can't A human cannot physically like the complexity required, in my view, to like build a brain, it's similar to like like creating Lionel Messi's neural pathways in his legs, right? Like it's just it's it's possible, but it's math at the end of the day, but the complexity of it is like millions of lines of code. Like you're just never

[11:22] going to get there with humans. But if you can take all of what's happening and just build a model and say, "Here, based on all this data, and here's here's the inputs, here's the output, and now we want this new output. We want a goal to get scored, right? What do you do in this scenario? Oh, well, based on the million pieces of data we have from Messi and every other soccer player, we can you know, the only the really only the like the only real problem basically it's gone from a science problem to an engineering problem. Like the science is solved. We've like

[11:53] basically solved the science. That sports thing is interesting. So, Yeah, I mean the only thing you have to do for sports is get the data, which is you just which is like Neuralink. Like why is Elon working on Neuralink, right? Like we just need to get the sensors in the place where we can get the math. And the math simplifies down to zeros and ones, right? And so we just need to get basically the what's like the brain and and the leg are talking via nerves, which is basically the you know, our electronic circuit. And so we just need to basically like look at what's happening there. And we will we will

[12:26] 100% basically be able to to you know, get rid of pain, um probably you know, short circuit depression, like all these sorts of things we will be able to do without needing to know exactly what you know, we'll know the math cuz you can look into this function, right? Just like you can look into stable diffusion and and do the math and figure out what's actually happening. Um but

[12:47] you won't need to, right? It doesn't It doesn't happen overnight though. I feel like let's just use the sports example for a second. So, let's think about how sports and sports viewership has evolved over the last 100 years or whatever. So, in the beginning like you you know, we would play soccer together, we'd be on a field. Then, you know, radio comes out, all of a sudden you're listening or television comes out, you're watching

[13:15] other people play on a field. And then, you know, video games come out and at the time it's like, "What do you mean? You're watching someone play video games. You're what, you know, you're watching Counter-Strike on Twitch." Like, that's that's not even you know, those are that's fake bodies, right? Those are essentially just like fake bodies playing connected to a

[13:35] computer. And then all of a sudden, there's hundreds of millions of people watching that. And now, you know, there's you you know, I believe what you're saying is true, which is, you know, everyone's seen or a lot of people have seen those um those dog videos or what's the robotics company, Boston Boston Dynamics. And you watch these dogs basically move around, and they look and feel like, you know, real dogs or real animals, and it gives you this weird feeling. Everyone

[14:04] sits there, you get this weird feeling. And it's because you can kind of see where it's going to go. So, yeah, could I imagine that like instead of a dog it's a human, and instead of a human, maybe they're playing soccer, and instead of like being trained by a human behind it, maybe it's trained, you know, with AI, etc. It It makes That's the arrow of progress. Or or or and I think that's the that's certainly the arrow of technology, right? Like, if you wanted to build the best soccer player on Earth, 100% it would be a robot. It

[14:35] would not be a human being, right? The question I think is also like, what does that mean, right? Like, for example, will people replace dogs with robot dogs because they no longer have to take them for walks? If they are functionally as similar as a dog, right? Um and I think a lot of people will not. I think a lot of people will say will basically reject uh this stuff, just like they're I still paint with oil paints, right, for example. Um

[15:05] but will you be able to make money? No. Because what it does is it shows you that this is basically valueless. I think these things have value in this weird cultural sort of bubble and zeitgeist. But the minute that a human or a robot can kind of do it just as well as a human, it sort of reveals the illusion that this thing is actually useful and interesting, and people will just move on to something that only humans will do. I think that's really what the pattern will be, is that people will play soccer for fun, but not to make money. I think there will be new sports that robots

[15:41] cannot yet do, like surfing. I think my my my my feeling is that surfing is much harder um than soccer uh for a robot to do. And so, you know, uh you'll you'll kind of move the the goal post essentially, right? But just for example, like how many people make a living playing chess? Nobody. Right, like basically four

[16:00] people or I don't know how many people. Um but very very few. Um and I guarantee you if you look at like, you know, the the sort of I'm sure like when robots started to be able to do this stuff, it's like, okay, then why would I bother, right? Like well, if it's fun, do it. Um but certainly to make a living, like getting into chess is not. No one would tell you that that's what to do, right? Um

[16:21] or getting into horseback riding. Uh but guess what? Like that's every job. Like every job is basically going to go through this thing. And people I think that's the thing that the sort of like this like has hasn't really figured out. There are all these artists getting really mad that like AI is going to take their jobs or whatever. But the truth is like AI took art away from their job long ago. Like these people are painting rocks for Pixar, right? Like they're

[16:45] doing a rote thing. They're not artists. They're executing a director's vision. They're hands. They're being paid for their their hands. They're being paid for the training data because they painted a lot rocks in the past so that they know how to paint rocks now. Um they're not paid for like their creative talent, their taste. That's another thing I think is interesting about the video game sports thing, is that basically what it's done is people who may not have had the physical stature to play soccer, but did have the hand-eye coordination and the intellect to play soccer, can now play FIFA and kind of can get really good at that. But what it

[17:18] shows me is that basically everything below here is going to be done you know, you're you're going to be judged more and more just based on what's in here and almost nothing else. And to be honest, like that's going to lead to a very unequal world because we like to think that everyone is identical here and we're just different below, you know? And By the way, if you're listening right now and you're not watching us on YouTube Yeah, I'm

[17:41] He's describing his head. Yeah, my my you know, like basically what we're doing is we're we're we're we're saying that like any privilege associated with with anything else, height or body mass or, you know, fast switch muscle fibers basically is not going to matter 100 years from now, right? Just like for example, height doesn't really matter in in today's

[18:00] society, but it used to 100 years ago. Um and that's going to just continue to happen until basically we're all just able to like, you know, we we're kind of born, we we like reach puberty and that's basically as as functional as we're ever going to be because everything else you know, all the training, all the memorization, all all all all that stuff

[18:17] we're we've sort of already outsourced. Um and really the only stuff that differentiates us is stuff like working memory which all the the stuff's basically genetic. So, that's going to be weird. I I think we're going to seriously severely have to rewrite like how how we how we think of of human beings and values and taxes and income inequality wealth inequality. All these things are going to have to change pretty dramatically. Probably should have in

[18:38] the '70s. Um but you know, it's going to get worse and worse and worse. Not that Did did Did you see this thread by this guy uh Francois Chollet? He's um deep learn deep learning guy um at Google. Um so he tweeted for those who didn't see it, "The current climate in AI has so many parallels to 2021 web3. It's making me uncomfortable. Narratives based on zero data are acceptable are accepted as self-evident. Everyone is expecting as a sure thing civilization impact, and a 100 times return on investment in the next two to three years. Personally, I think there's a bull case and a bear case. The bull case

[19:20] is way more conservative than what the median person on my timeline considers as completely self-evident. And the actual outcome we'll see is statistically likely to lie in between, somewhat closer to the bear case. What do you think about that? I mean, I have I don't care at all about the the financial investment piece of it, right? So, is it going to be 100x? Is there any way to make money on AI? Like, I have no idea. But, will it dramatically

[19:47] transform society? Yeah, 100%. I mean, I I I don't I don't think this is anything new. I think this is what data does. It automates wrote input. And I don't see why I don't see how that I mean, definitely I can see why people are saying, "Oh, this is just like Web3." In the sense that there's lots of people

[20:07] loud and proud on Twitter. Um But, I think you could apply the same thing to tons and tons of other stuff, right? Um that people It's just we we coalesce memetically about certain topics and then share those things. And the truth is, people on Twitter uh are attention horse. And so, we are I mean, that's I will I love the uh the view count, frankly, because it exposes

[20:30] us for the attention horse that we are. That's why we tweet. We want views. Um why do we want attention? It's so we can make money at some point in the future based on that attention. And so, yeah, of course you're going to have like a similar sort of zeitgeist build up around AI. Um 99% of it is is BS. Um However, like I spent most of the Web3 stuff reading papers, and I spend most of my AI time

[20:54] reading papers. Uh and so, I can compare the papers from AI and compare the papers in crypto. And the papers in crypto are actually quite interesting. I can give you two or three that are incredibly compelling. I can give you two or three a week in AI that are incredibly compelling. Right? And so I think that's very, very different. I think crypto is mostly engineers outside of academia. I think AI is mostly engineers within academia. And so you have I think you have a much higher bar to get stuff funded in academia. Um you have many more diverse uh viewpoints in in in AI. Um my guess is in web3 there

[21:29] you know almost everybody was anti-web3 except for like a few hundred people, right? That made a lot of money. Um so I don't I don't think it's the same at all. I think he probably just follows like a a very uh you know small slice of of the population. I will agree with him though on that 100 X invest thing, right? Because that I do think is a problem. Um I never thought that the that web3 was a great way to make money

[21:52] necessarily. Um I again, I'm a builder. I like technology, right? Like if you ask me what's interesting about crypto, I'll tell you the interesting technology. Um like the general the Byzantine generals problem that led to Bitcoin for example. That's super compelling. The Turing completeness of Ethereum is super compelling. And my investments follow technology. So I cannot invest in something unless there is a paper or unless there is some code that's interesting that hasn't been written in that way before. Cuz that's how you you make money as a VC like like

[22:20] I do. Um and so yeah, I I definitely agree with him that like I I could 100% see that like 10 years from now there's there's no way to make money in AI, right? Like basically nobody made any money on AI. All the returns basically just went to you know whoever like basically gets attention so that they can monetize via ads. Um I actually think that's quite likely. Um and that's why I like being an investor so I can invest in a bunch of stuff, but I'm not you know spending my you know I'm not putting all my eggs you know in one basket. I'm not a CEO of a company

[22:50] um in this space. I would say by the way that like that's the always the other thing is like I just like like there's all these people who have opinions uh on Twitter. Like you should ignore 99.9% of them, right? Cuz what really matters is like what's on like what's on their screen? Like what are they looking at? Um are they generally if they're not looking at code, I don't really care about their opinion, to be honest. Um

[23:12] and I've held this view for a long time. Like if you if you would I tweeted a while ago, it was I don't know, I got some pushback, but I basically said if you want to avoid scams, only invest in people who know how to code. Um and obviously the counterfactual is a fallacy, so you you can't reverse chain that and say, "Oh, well, would you invest in people who don't know how to code?" Of course I would. Um but certainly the number one, you know, thing you could do to to kind of invest in and and make money, frankly, is to invest in people who know how to code

[23:36] because those people are the most leveraged people. Everybody else is basically building an audience off of a of of skillset that's just not that valuable in today's society. And so we're really struggling to do so, which is why we're hyping all this stuff on on the internet all the time. Can't you, you know, okay, so I I understand your argument, which is basically like if you want the most amount of leverage, learn

[23:56] how to code. Uh because you're basically building a machine, like like you, you know, you started Gumroad, uh which is essentially payments for creators, landing pages for creators, and you know, I'm sure hundreds of millions of dollars have gone through the platform, and you start, you know, the MVP was in 2 weeks. The minimal viable viable product was built to or sorry, the minimal viable product was built in a weekend. Um so code is magical in that sense. But can't you, you know, be a magician

[24:26] as a designer, a copywriter, a marketer? Isn't that No. Yeah, I don't think so. Explain why. Yeah, I don't think so. And and the reason is because uh it's not a it's not an or. Uh the best uh painters I know write So it's just not it it it it writing code doesn't mean you cannot be a painter, cannot be all of these other things. And so what ends up happening uh is that the best painters are the the who know how to code. And because they know how to code, they can basically

[24:58] automate 10, 20, 30 of of their peers. Um and so that's generally like for example, a really you can see this in art um in the entertainment industry uh for example, because in back in the day like if you worked on Star Wars in the '70s, you were doing everything traditionally. And then basically photo bashing started happening. So things started to go

[25:17] digital. By the way, artists freaked out about that change where they're like, "What? No, you can't do digital. That's crazy. Copy paste what?" You know, uh copy paste, no way. Uh and then photo bashing became a thing because you could now basically like do a mock and then you could take a bunch of photos and and skew them on Photoshop and then like get really, you know, and

[25:36] people are like, "That's cheating. That's not allowed." Every single movie you've seen in the theater it uses photo bashing. Avatar, like this is how they get to like super highly rendered matte paintings in the background. All the backgrounds are are paintings basically, and they're paintings that are photo bashed together, right? And this is what every single amazing like Dylan Cole who's the that basically the the art director behind Avatar, that's how he became famous is he basically pioneered this technique, literally. And so he's literally like in charge of the most, you know, the most important probably visual IP of this year because he automated his peers, right? Um and he

[26:07] was [ __ ] on for that in the industry for a long period of time. So I think what you'll end up seeing is you'll just see a continuation of that where the best uh the best artists are using AI in their workflow uh and they're just automating all of their peers. They're able to do so much more work with themselves. Um and that's what that's exactly what I see happening, to be honest. Like I I see a bunch of my artist friends uh who know how to code. Code Code takes about, you know, the thing is when people say like you don't want to learn

[26:33] to code. To me that's like saying I don't want to learn how to speak English. Like it doesn't take a lot, you know, like I'm not asking you to get a four-year degree in computer science. I don't have one. I didn't go to I went to uh USC for one semester and dropped out. All I'm saying is like Google like how to, you know, start a blog and ship it to Heroku um and and understand that piece of code. Um and I you know obviously you don't need to it's completely a choice. But as an investor like I can just look at my portfolio and I can look at you know

[26:59] anyone can look at who's successful. Google. I mean if you look at startups, right? If you look at startups and you say okay 99% of the public value is basically or 90 plus percent is basically in four five companies, right? If you get rid of like Google, Amazon, Meta, like we haven't done [ __ ] as an industry, right? In terms of actually creating value. The whole reason venture capital exists, right? Uh basically are

[27:22] all started by engineers. Computer scientists or software engineers. Uh even Bezos I think had a CS degree. Um and it's just as it's a pattern I see over and over and over again. It's kind of undeniable. Um and I think it's just kind of you know it's just it's just what it is, you

[27:39] know? What what about like do you need to be writing code or could you just understand how to read code? Like you know I get the argument where it's like okay um You need to understand data structures and you need to understand the fundamentals. So for example, if you want to be an artist, you have to learn

[27:57] perspective, you have to learn anatomy. And if you are not able to do perspective and anatomy, it doesn't matter how good AI is, it will not help you currently at least do it. Anatomy, perspective, design, composition, uh color, all of that stuff you have to learn. Uh and by the way, if you look at artists who are not that good, it's often because they don't actually have the fundamentals in place. Like they know how to draw dragons, but they don't know perspective. So the dragons look all stupid and wonky, right? Or they draw eyes that look like almonds. No, you have to learn the anatomy of the

[28:28] eye. And guess what? Is that fun? No. But what is it? It's STEM. It's science and math. It always comes back to STEM, science, math, and engineering. Um art is just like a tiny layer on top of STEM, on top of understanding the physics of the world. And so I think when you learn computer science, what I really mean is just this the the equivalent of the those fundamentals, which means data structures,

[28:50] conditionals, algorithms. Um you need to understand how like HTTP works. You have to understand how the internet operates. Like when you use an app, like what's what's on your phone? What's you know, like because otherwise you can't build anything. You can't really build anything new. You can copy paste, right? Like for example, I can like if there's a something I don't know how to do, I can pretend, but will I ever be able to contribute to the

[29:13] frontier? No. No. And guess what? Guess who gets all the money? All the reward? It's not number two, not number three, right? I can play chess. You know? I'm not making money as a chess player. All I'm saying is if I'm trying to make money as a chess player, I need to be the best. And the best and I guarantee you this is true. I guarantee you if you talk to Magnus Carlsen, he knows how to code. I guarantee you. Um

[29:38] because that's what chess is. It's it's and and he knows what that he knows that that's what chess is. And that's why he's so good is he can figure out, oh, this is what it's I'm building a heuristical model and I'm I'm exploring these paths and I basically have to figure out what's the longest path that doesn't lead to a loss, um which is probably the right move to make. Which is guess what? That's what

[29:59] AlphaZero does. Yeah. Yeah, I think just reflecting on what you what you really understand it. And the truth is if you can't write it, you don't actually understand it. So you can pretend that you get it, uh but the truth is if you read the Bitcoin white paper and you haven't actually implemented it, you don't actually understand it. You don't actually understand what the math is. Um and therefore you're never going to build anything that's a like to build something so compelling that it's created billions of dollars in value is so hard and so rare to think that the you know, 50 or 100 hours of curriculum

[30:39] you have to do to like unlock that. Like that you like that's going to like of course you're going to need that, right? Because it's not that hard of a barrier to to overcome. So, of course there's going to be a thousand I don't know how many let's say there's like 10 million people on in the world that can code. So, why would you be you know, if you can't like why would I you know So, anyway Yeah, my my my takeaway from what you're saying really is you know, one of the most important things that we teach our children is understanding physics, right? Like if I

[31:11] take this apple and I drop it to the ground, it moves down at 9.8 m per squared. I know that this this apple is going to hit the ground and I know how to navigate my world based on these laws that govern our world. What you're saying is basically like we're spending a lot of time in these digital worlds. And what governs our digital worlds are are these sets of

[31:37] laws. Not really physics, but it's enforced by code. So, to if you want to you know, go out in the wild wild west and you want to you know, stake a claim basically you know, you really need to understand like the equivalent of gravity, but in our virtual worlds. Is that right? Like for yeah, exactly. Like for example, I own a house. I bought a house, you know, 300 grand whatever, but would I ever claim to be a real estate developer or an investor? No, cuz I don't understand like migration patterns. I don't understand weather. I don't understand flooding in this region. I don't understand the

[32:14] atmospheric river, whatever the hell that is people are talking about on Twitter. I don't understand traffic flows. Like all of these things, if you want to do you you're not you're not living in a vacuum. That's the other thing is like there are 7 billion, 8 billion, whatever the number is people out there who want to make money too, right? And so yeah, if you were the only person, then yeah, you totally could do this without knowing traffic flows. But in a world in which Blackstone knows that stuff, you are going to get destroyed by them, right? Because you don't know that stuff. And that's what I see all day in

[32:46] in in in our field is that like I can build Gumroad in a weekend. Um and I can out-ship basically any if it doesn't matter how awesome your team is if it doesn't have engineers on it, I will beat them. Right? I would just I will win. Um I can ship more code than most of my portfolio

[33:03] companies. And I'm a technical person that generally only invests in technical teams. Uh and so I it's just it's a I I don't think people really rock the the sort of difference that can make, right? Like I can make Gumroad every weekend. Which means I can make a new company every weekend. And that company can probably raise money at a 10 15 million post-money valuation. I can do that

[33:27] literally every single weekend. That's like insane. A lot of people ask me, Greg, how do you build products that foster community? Well, I've got good news. That's exactly what Laycheckout does, my company. We partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community. We add a couple interesting

[33:56] clients every single year. So, if you're interested and that sounds like you, email frontdesk@laycheckout.studio with what you're working on, what you need help with, and don't forget to mention the Where It Happens pod. Thank you. So, what do you what do you recommend to people who might not be technical but who are listening to you now and be

[34:22] like, you know what? This guy's crazy, but he might be on to something. Um so, I'm willing to to dedicate some some of my time in 2023 to learning to be more technical and shipping one product or two products. I mean, I think that you know, the what I did was I really wanted to build something and the only way for me to build that thing was to learn how to code cuz I had no money to hire anybody else, which is true for most people. Engineers, by the way, are very expensive. So, if you can't learn a code, let's just say you're you're you're going to spend 250

[34:53] grand a year on one person, right? So, good luck building a successful company uh uh with that. That's just almost impossible. Um So, I would say find something that you really want to build. It doesn't matter how simple or easy uh the actually the simpler the you know, easier the better, probably. And build that thing. Like the first thing I think I ever built was a GPA calculator, where in just an Excel, you I put in my math classes and then I put it or you know, my classes or whatever. And then I put in like my you know, A B C D, whatever. And then I just

[35:24] had a you know, a column that said like if A, four, if B, three, whatever. And then you know, like sum divide by number of classes. And that was like a calculator I built, like little GPA calculator in Excel. And then build that with Python. Like build the exact same thing, but just build it with Python, like you know, use ChatGPT, probably write 99% of that code for you, and then just write a Python script that's just local on your computer. But you need to solve like like some problem that and and and the way that I think about it is save time or save money, generally. Like

[35:57] what do you spend time or money doing that you wish you didn't and then just automate that. Um And then, you know, uh you you know, there there should be something in your life that you're like, "Oh, I spend 5 minutes like doing these three things." And it's like, "Okay, I can I For example, let's say you wake up and you open like seven tabs, right?" Uh you open like Twitter and Reddit and

[36:15] whatever, and it's part of your job. Well, write a script that opens those seven tabs for you, and then all you have to do is run a one script and boom, it'll it'll open up. And guess what? When you have that script, you can start doing other stuff. Once you have the glue, you can start saying, "Oh, well, what you know, you could actually parse the tweets and turn it into like a you know, I could like probably by the end of the day, I could take I could probably take like my Twitter feed and turn it into a 30-minute podcast that I could listen to

[36:41] like while I'm at the gym or something, right? It would take me probably like a few hours uh to do with the current tech. Um I don't know if there's a product there. I don't know if there's a business there, but I know that doing that, you know, will teach me skills. Um And certainly like in 2022 would have been enough to raise a million bucks, right? Or whatever. Um and so, I would just say always always start there. Um Uh and then I would I also to be honest, like I have tons of friends who are like, "Oh, I want to learn to code." And

[37:08] then like 2 years go by and they they haven't. And I just tell them like you will never do it. Like stop wanting to do something you will never do. It just makes you sad and depressed. Right? Like for example, I don't intend to ever play in the NBA. Never. Not in my, you know, you can't

[37:22] tell that I'm actually 9 ft tall, right? Um But uh no, it just it was never on my it was never on my list of things to do uh cuz I knew that I would never be any good at it uh cuz I just don't have the I just literally cannot. You know, I don't have the height. Um And thank god I wasn't born in 1892. I would have been screwed at the factory, right? Um but luckily I was born in 1992 and the world is my

[37:44] oyster cuz I know how to code. Why? I don't know. Uh and so, that's the other thing is just like figure out what, you know, life's not a vacuum. So, like figure out what you want to do. Don't let other people tell you what you want to do. Um and it's never been cheaper than, you know, to be happier. Uh like it's it's like almost free to be happy. Like move to a place near the near the equator and you'll pay almost not no no nothing in, you know, in like rent will be a few hundred bucks a month. Food will be almost free. Uh if

[38:10] you speak English, you can probably make that in just, you know, teaching people English. back Let's come back to that quality of life thing cuz I want to I want to get back to that. Cuz I I'm interested in that, actually. But on the on the how do you become technical how do you take someone who's not technical and make them technical? It sounds like what you're saying is step one is find a problem in your everyday life and you know, step two is use platforms like chat GPT to help, you know, write some of that initial code and just start, you know, trying to

[38:45] learn from there. Go online, you know, obviously there's you know, tons of places where you can learn different different Yeah. Well, it's it's it's tough. The reason it's so hard, the reason it's it's like why isn't this easy? Obviously, if you can code you can make like 200 grand a year in a year in a year. Like why wouldn't more people not do that? But it's kind of like learning English where it's it's not like there's a simple like learn this and then learn this. It's like you kind of have to learn the whole thing and it's like a big puzzle piece and you're filling in the gaps like as

[39:13] you go and eventually you have enough knowledge that you you you maybe don't even know like I don't know English. I can't tell you what the rules of English are, right? I can't tell you why like the old red car sounds, you know, better than the red old car. Sounds weird. But it does. It's just built into our brains that way. We have to learn it. And so coding is I think similar in which you just have to learn this stuff by a lots of rote practice and building stuff and you have to start small. So that's like English and build up from there. But guess what? How many people learn a

[39:44] foreign language? Almost nobody, right? The way you learn a foreign language is you move to a place and you're like, "Ah, crap." And guess what? You you'll learn a foreign language about three to six months. You can become basically conversationally fluent because it's not that hard. Um, but you have to force yourself to, right? And so that that that that I think is a big one. I I think if if the It also is like why do you want to, right? That's a big

[40:07] question. If you want to build stuff like I want to build stuff, by the way, you'll do it. The truth is many people don't actually want to build stuff. They want to make money. They don't want to work anymore. Uh they have these other things that they want. Uh and that's why they want to build stuff. And that's honestly not I don't know if that ever has worked because learning to code is like hitting your head against a wall for 5 years. It's very satisfying cuz you make millions of dollars and you get to build stuff. You don't have to work anymore. Um but it is, you know,

[40:36] frustrating on the path to getting there. And so you have to like debug building part The building part is actually like uh not enough people talk about like how amazing it is to just like you know, using your example of like the eight tab script and you put it out in the world and you like post about it on Reddit or you post about it on Twitter and all of a sudden it goes viral and you're like Yeah. Or you don't. And you just realize, holy [ __ ] like I'm spending Yeah, like I have I have an extra 10

[41:03] minutes a day. Yeah. And like with that 10 minutes a day, I could have an extra 20 minutes a day. Yeah. And like with an extra 20 minutes a day, I could have an extra hour a day because I'm constantly using that uh to automate more and more and more. And and and and the premier way of automation, like I always joke with people, like the the way you automate, almost died. Um the way you automate people or sorry, the way you automate is you just hire

[41:26] somebody else to do your job. So like once you can make like, let's say two to 300 grand a year, you don't really have to work anymore. Like working is very much a choice. And so I Like for example, like how many hours a week at Gumroad do I work? In front of a laptop, zero. Basically. I don't I don't like I

[41:46] don't type. I generally just respond to messages on on Slack and Notion. And this is what most CEOs do. That's like you know, why why it's appealing. Um obviously Elon doesn't work at Tesla and SpaceX at all and those companies are doing decently well even though he's technically still the CEO of both of those companies, right? Um and so he's you know, he's automated the crap

[42:08] out of himself, right? And guess what? He knows how to code. It's probably not a coincidence that he he's able to do that. Um and so yeah, I think that the the appeal is like you really have to know why you're doing it. For me, it's like I don't like doing things I don't like to do. And so I just automate the crap out of everything and I just it means I have, you know, basically after this I'm done for the day, right? Um but how badly do you want it? Like most people actually if they heard about my lifestyle, they'd be like, "No way. I don't want that." Like I live

[42:35] in Oregon. I talk to basically on average one human a day, which is my wife. I don't I I don't have a social life. I don't have any friends uh in in the area. I basically all of my friends are like talking about papers uh about AI and stuff. Um that's it. That's my life. Uh if that's not chose that life. You chose that life, right? Like that's that's the life you want for yourself. And and isn't that

[43:01] what a lot of people want? yeah, 100%. Yeah, I mean, I could I have unlimited amounts of time and money and whatever. I there's no bottleneck on what I can do, right? Um it's completely a choice. that's attractive to people. What what's attractive to people isn't the fact of how you design your life particularly, but is the fact that you designed your life the way you wanted it to be and you

[43:23] did it. I think they're related. The fact that I'm able to design my life like this is because I have a personality that wants a life that is like mine, right? For example, if you like hanging out with people, if you like hanging out with with your friends like every day at night, you

[43:42] will never have my lifestyle, ever. Because the way that I have my lifestyle is I spend my Friday nights building software. That's when I built Gumroad. I didn't build Gumroad 9:00 to 5:00. I built it when? On the weekend. If you don't build software on the weekend, you will never build Gumroad. You will never have my

[43:59] lifestyle. You just won't. You just won't. You have to do this stuff on the weekends. You have to do this stuff on Friday nights. Um And and again, like let's say you don't because technically you don't, right? Obviously, I there must be an example. But like let's go back to the AI thing, right? The cool thing with AI is you don't actually have to know how to do anything. You just need data and outputs and they'll tell you can you do it or

[44:21] not, right? Based on the data. I have see a lot of data. I can't think of a a single example, to be honest. I can't think of a single example of someone who is non-technical, doesn't have any interest in knowing how to code and has built a $10 billion company. Like is it possible? Yeah, of course it is possible, but that person got killed by someone who was working on Friday night, right? Like that's what tends to happen. Uh like Zuck didn't win because he was the best engineer on planet Earth. It's because he really wanted to build stuff. Um I don't even think Facebook was his idea,

[44:55] right? Like but he won. Why did he win? Like, you know? Uh cuz he was the one who knew how to code. Yeah, I think That's it. Another another benefit, like if we forget for one second like the financial benefits of learning how to code and building, the other benefit and I think you'll agree with this is it just feels really good like conceptualizing something and just like putting it out there. Like I remember the first time I coded anything, I was lucky that the school I went to in the seventh grade, they had a coding class. Took it and one of the first projects was

[45:32] um build something in Visual Basic 6. So, this is a long time ago for those of you who know what that is. Um and I I built a slot machine. I thought it'd be fun to build a slot machine. I built it and just seeing it work like such a incredible feeling that I built this thing, I published it,

[45:56] other people could use it. And it didn't make a difference if a million people used it or I just used it, didn't make a difference if I, you know, created a casino around it and so and made all this money from it. Like I didn't care. I was just like, "Wow, I I got to build this my channel." And there's something powerful about like you could die and that thing still exists. Like there's something, at least to me, that was important. It's like it was almost like a legacy of like if I can build stuff, put it out. And I too I think tweeting and all these things are

[46:25] similar. Like when you write a great thing and you put it out there, you're like, "This is part of your kind of your your public, you know, output uh that will exist long after you're dead or whatever." Um but for some reason building like I built like a game to like break out, you know? And I my teacher was like, "You can't play video games during class unless you made the game yourself." And I was like, "Cool, I'll go build a game that I want to play." Uh and did, you know? Uh

[46:49] good good teacher, by the way. And uh you know, it it but it was similar. Naval your teacher or something? Oh man, I can't imagine. Naval, I I don't even know if Naval would teach. He'd be like, "Here's a laptop. Here's math, addition and and you can figure out the rest. I don't Right, yeah. Let's talk about that for 1 second. What would if Naval was designing, you know, a high school or something, what would what

[47:12] would it be like? I've talked to him about this actually. I asked him this exact question. I was like, "How do you, you know, he has kids. Like how do you think about How do you just think about raising kids and teaching them?" And he said he He said he not too different, I think. It's like focus on math, basically. Like if I think it I think math is the underlying, you know, now I'm saying my own stuff, but like basically math is

[47:33] the underlying substrate of reality. It's the language that we use. And so if you can teach someone math, then they can learn whatever the hell else they want, given the internet. Like, you know, math is the sort of like for like I've been thinking about this actually with AI. It's like, "What is What is missing? What is missing currently from AI right now? Like what is next, right? Like how do you Like can it get better? What what what does it take to get better? And I think the number one thing that's missing is basically discrimination. Where right now you basically get all this data and you

[48:06] just, you know, you use that data to but you that currently the AI doesn't get a choice of like, did I learn the is this actually right or not, right? Like it just says, oh cool, yeah, like these strings lead to these strings. I can do that, right? Um and I think what's really important what a lot of people I think miss is like when you get new data, right? Like what did you learn that was actually not correct? And this is why the probabilistic piece I think is actually really important is because almost definitely there's a probability assigned to every single thing that you

[48:33] learn. Like how true is this thing? And often you read a book and you're like, oh my god, I'm so much smarter, right? Because I learned all these things. Very few people read a book and they're like, holy [ __ ] I'm so stupid now because I think I'm smart, but actually half the things that are in

[48:46] this book are actually completely wrong. And so to me what's so important about math is that it allows you this objective framework in which to evaluate new information. Uh so when I learn a new thing, most of the stuff I read to be honest on the internet, I'm like, this is wrong. I just it doesn't go into my mental model at all. Um like that's why I have

[49:07] to read papers and I have to read books. Basically, the only things that I can add to my brain are through books and through papers because nothing else has the foundational uh has enough foundational stuff there for me to feel good enough about adding it to my mental model. Um and so I think that's that's where you start and I I would say if you can't like you can't really teach anyone anything is my guess. They have to want to learn it. And so I think you have to give them access to a computer and you have to teach them maybe some basic skills like English, you know,

[49:38] speaking, writing, and some math, maybe some physics or something. And at that point, it's like here's a laptop. What do you want to learn? What do you want to build? What do you want to do? Like what do you want to understand? And that's all you can really do. Uh like there's a there's a big controversy right now in the UK cuz it's like oh like Rishi Sunak is like making everyone do math and math is super key and in the US we're talking about it like oh you know we more people need to know math like we're getting screwed by China and

[50:03] India blah blah blah. And it's like well I think the thing that people aren't really questioning is like well what if you can't? Like but it's not new that like we wanted to teach people these skills for hundreds of years. What if you just can't? There's certain people who want and it's not capability in my view it's

[50:22] purely a desire. I I like I want to build stuff. Like when I share that thing and it works and it does its thing it feels super good. Like I get a deep amount of serotonin in my brain. Um that I don't get if I like see a nice thing at the at the jewelry shop and buy it and take it home. But I know that my wife is completely opposite for me. She doesn't care at all about what I do and she loves what she does. And so I think people are different and we have to acknowledge that and that will skew in these ways and I think we're forcing

[50:49] everyone to say everyone needs to learn math cuz math is essential in this new society. Uh it's like yeah you should learn addition and subtraction and multiplication and division which by the way is what's enough for the Romans to function. Like they didn't even have the number zero which means they didn't even know multiplication. The Romans you can do accounting you can do real estate you can do all these things without without

[51:07] even multiplication. Wait sorry the Romans didn't have the number zero? Yeah it came from the Indians. Yeah yeah because you don't need it. You don't really need it. Like why would you need the number zero? What's what's the use of the number zero? Uh the number zero doesn't exist inherently right? Like it literally refers to the concept of not existing so the only the only reason you need zero is I mean there's a lot of benefits to inventing zero because once you have zero then you can you have the decimal

[51:36] system then you can do multiplication. Once you have multiplication you can do exponentiation. Once you have exponentiation now you can do predictions you know statistical modeling. So if you're an investor then yes you need multiplication. Um but basically if you're a real estate agent or if you're an accountant, which were the basically the two core money related roles for a long period of time, you only need addition. I was actually talking to somebody and I was like, "Yeah, you don't need any multiplication for accounting." He's like, "I'm the CFO of this major brand and you're telling me that like you can

[52:04] do my entire job with addition?" And it like after 5 seconds he was like, "Yeah, I guess you can. It's called double entry accounting. That's why is double entry accounting a a thing? It's cuz there's no zero. So how do you make a zero? It's plus one negative one. So yeah, you don't need you don't need multiplication accounting. Uh Romans didn't have it. That's why they couldn't

[52:26] predict anything. You know, you can't you need multiplication to predict. Um also what's really fascinating is in nature, the concept of multiplication only exists once. There's only been one time in the history of the universe where like multiplication has existed. But beyond that we just basically from the Big Bang just like divided stuff into pieces, which is DNA. Life. Life is the only thing that actually has the property of

[52:52] multiplication. That's it. Uh so yeah, it's kind of crazy. I I think it's like it's fundamentally like it like kind of a kind of crazy how important math is and also how long we didn't have it, you know? Um but it also shows we don't actually need it. Like we don't actually have to like a you know, this this is the other thing is like 100,000 software engineers can

[53:12] run the world. Like we don't need a million. We don't need 10 million. And we'll by the way never get them anyway. We can try. We can we can give everyone college degrees. Uh by the way, most people TS degrees don't know how to code, you know? Uh it's just we're we're we're we're we're like we just have to be okay with like there's a limited quantity of these people who want to do it and have the capacity to. Um and let's like make those people really really successful. Let's tax the crap out of them so we can all do pretty well. Um but I do think like I this this is the

[53:43] thing I really agree with on like the whole like sort of Ponzi stuff around crypto and stuff. It's like the vast majority of us are just grifters. There's like a few people actually building the tech. Um, and actually that the number of people because of automation is actually getting smaller all the time. Right? I think this is a huge reason that like the managerial class exists is because there are all these people who would have been automated away in the '70s because of computer science. Uh, and are like, "No, I still need a job. That's nice air conditioned and I want to type on a

[54:11] laptop. So let's create all this crap." Right? Um, because how do you not? Uh, but I totally think you could run like America with like, you know, like a a few thousand people, right? Um, with software. Again, like what is How many How many people like work it for the Social Security Administration? I think it's like 100,000 people or something, you know, it's like maybe millions, I don't know. Tons of people. How many do you actually need? Again, it's just

[54:33] math. It's just addition. So the IRS hired like 87,000 new people to go, you know, audit people and stuff. Yeah, and what is that? It's literally just math. It's completely automated. It's It should be completely automated. Uh, it should require actually like the goal is zero. Like the goal is is In Gumroad, for example,

[54:55] we have zero full-time employees. The goal is zero, right? Uh, you can 100% run Gumroad like the US government was like a bunch of part-time employees for a long time, right? Like let's get back to that. Um, and you can do it now with code. Um, it's it's certainly possible. It's just the problem is how do you actually You require You need leadership to actually implement all these things and you need consensus and like all these other things. Um, it'll it'll certainly happen in the next like few hundred years is my guess. Um, but yeah, I I again, it it kind of but it comes back

[55:25] to like, "Well, what do people do?" Right? Uh, what do people do? Well, they won't be making art like people think. They won't be poets because AI will show people that that's all kind of a BS thing that we just did at a period of time and like people actually don't like making art and poems uh if there is if there is no monetary or fame attached to it. That's the truth. I mean, that's pretty revealed during what what you know, COVID and the pandemic and all these things. Like, it's pretty clear that people don't actually like doing this stuff. Um So, what do people want to do? Well, my

[55:55] guess is they they would move closer to the equator and use their bodies uh more. Uh is generally what I what I And guess what? This is what people do. Like, what do rich people do? Want Like, they go to Italy and Greece and they walk around and eat food and they go to the African safari and they walk around and eat food and they go That is what humans do. That's what humans would prefer to do. Uh if we had unlimited time and money, we would do

[56:16] that. And so, why the hell are we all living in Russia and like Portland, Oregon and you know, like we should all be moving closer and closer to the equator. Um It's honestly shocking to me that that like that isn't like a like we have all this like housing prices. You want housing prices to go down? Get the people here who shouldn't even be here anymore. They're just here randomly cuz they're like, you know, two, three generations ago someone wanted beaver

[56:39] pelts to sell to Chinese emperors. Right? And move them the hell down. Uh It's like it's crazy to me. Um There's only As a Canadian, I I I I don't I definitely feel for feel that. Yeah, I mean, I I I'm I I mean, I literally cannot live in Portland, Oregon. Like, I'm deeply vitamin D deficient cuz I have too much melanin in my skin. So, I I like physically get depressed. Like, I physically feel it. Um and my guess is actually I'm not the only one who physically feels it. I'm just more aware of it because I have choice. Um And and and and freedom and grew up in Singapore

[57:14] near the equator. But like, no, I have a completely have depression like three to four months of the year because it's gray and there's no sun basically. Um Like, why the hell am I here? I wouldn't be without, you know, without my wife basically. Um but then why the hell is everybody else here? It's a well, they can't move anywhere. They like they just you know, it's like the conceptual model

[57:30] to be like, I can leave, you know? Doesn't really exist. Um Well, one is borders. Like, one is like there's a legitimate 100%. I mean, that definitely needs We need to figure that out. I mean, that's what That's why I think there should be an effort. Like, we should figure out how do we get where there's all these all these Mexicans moving to America,

[57:47] which is awesome. They totally should. But, guess what should also be happening? All these Americans should be moving to Mexico. Mexico is super cheap and way better weather. Like, why are you here, you know? Um You should be here if your if your goal is to innovate, if your goal is to make money. But, as soon as you've done those sort of things, you should like don't go to Florida. Like, go to Costa Rica. Go to like literally go anywhere else in the world where your talent is so necessary. It's so vitally important. Your your your your your memes and genes are would be would do so

[58:15] much value in in these other places. But, but that I think that's a huge like liquidity problem that we have that uh that that that yeah, that that that should totally change. Um But, it honestly blew my mind cuz I I think this is a bias that I had. Like, I grew up in Singapore and then I was in SF and like

[58:31] was born in New York to Indian parents. Like, everyone I knew was always an immigrant. It was always like, oh, you you know. And then like now I live in Portland, Oregon. I'm like, 99.9% of the people I talk to were born and raised here, you know? Like, and it's shock It's It honestly blew my mind. Which is like It was like, wait, what? Like, you can just never leave your little place on Earth like even though you know everything is there. Um

[58:55] Yeah, I was like it's crazy to me. Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, a lot of thoughts there and we don't have that much time, but I think Listen, I think first of all, some people are just the you know, they're they're in Portland because they're in Portland. Like, there's an inertia to the place that you live and it's difficult to get up and leave everything you know for something new. That's just like a difficult thing that a lot of people have to deal with. The other thing is like family is a big pull for for a lot of people, right? Like it's honestly entirely family. I

[59:38] actually don't think the first one matters at all. I think it's purely family. Yeah. Yeah. I I think people stick here because they they they can't imagine life without their family. I see my family like once every 6 months. This is It's just who I am. It's my personality. It's the personality of my

[59:54] immigrant parents. Um And it's the it's the life that you designed. people who build billion-dollar companies, too. It's the It's the life that you designed for yourself, right? Like it's the I think it's the life life you want. And I think I don't value I don't value like hanging out with my parents weekly So I think

[1:00:14] people there. you know, is a great place to end, which is if people want to get the life that they imagine for themselves. Like how do you recommend them to reach out life? Honestly, I think everyone has it. That's my current belief is that everybody basically has the life that they want because the truth is like people do have the freedom to change if

[1:00:40] they wanted to and they don't. Um so most people like don't want to leave their family and that's totally fine. Uh I did. You know, most people don't want to learn how to code and that's totally fine. I did. I think what's most important is that people should want stop wanting things that they don't actually want. I think the the biggest concern I have right now is that people look at social media and they think they want all those things. Um and maybe they even do want those things, but they

[1:01:04] wouldn't have if they never saw it. They wouldn't want a six-pack if they never saw someone with a six-pack. Uh right? Like these sorts of things. And so I think most people should just really focus on what's really important to them and make sure that they're getting those sorts of things and I bet that they are uh and that they maybe just feel guilty because other people are saying, "Oh no, you should be doing this, and you should be doing that, and you should be doing that." No, like I don't think most people should be

[1:01:28] learning how to code. I never said that. All I said is if you want to like live my lifestyle, you're going to need it, cuz that's the only way you can automate stuff is with code. But, have Have you read uh I'm reading it right now, Wanting: The Creative Cycle? Yeah, is that the Luke Burgess book? Yeah, so it's the power Yeah, the the power of memetic desire in everyday life, and it's just goes through um this desire that all human human

[1:01:55] beings have to copy other human beings. If I see someone with a Rolex, I'm going to want a Rolex. If I see someone with a lot of followers, I'm going to want a lot of followers, and it's an absolute must read. Yeah, and and and I would say that there's certain people who don't have memetic drive nearly as much as other

[1:02:14] people. Yeah. Right? Like I don't have a watch. Uh I don't have anything besides a t-shirt and pant Like I have the essentials. I wrote a book called The Minimalist Entrepreneur, right? Like I don't have things. I don't. Like everything fits in a in a suitcase. Um or backpack, actually. Um and that's it. I don't like I don't want anything else. I really don't want Like why do I have lots of money? It's just so I can invest in startups. Like I

[1:02:42] don't want any physical things. I just don't have I have zero desires for that, you know? Why do I have a house? The only reason is cuz there are other human beings in my life now. And that's why I need a house. Otherwise, I don't really even need a house, right? Um and so that's the other thing. It's like this is who I am. Like I can't change it. Or I could, but I

[1:03:01] don't want to. I don't want to want more, you know? Uh I I find it weird that people have more. But like I've just never I've never been that person, like in high school or whatever. Like I've never Like who wants a nice fancy car? Like no, that's ridiculous. Um However, I would say that like one thing that was really important to me growing up is the fact that I didn't grow up in a single place, right? Like my parents are from India, I was born in New York, grew up in Hong Kong, Singapore, and London. And so very quickly, I think maybe that showed me that like this this whole

[1:03:28] thing is a memetic social game. That like everyone is copying each other. And when you constantly move from one place to one place, you realize like, "Oh, there's a game over here people are playing. There's this social game over here. There's a social game over here that people are playing." But what's really important is basically I think of it like there's three things, which is family, money,

[1:03:46] and weather. That's it. Those are the only three things that matter fundamentally. And I think most people actually are memetic and buying all those things to get laid, which is family. They feel like they won't be able to do that thing that they really want to do, which is have a family. And so they need the watch, they need the car, they need all those things. And by the way, they might be right. They might be right about those things cuz in many cultures those things do matter. I don't need

[1:04:13] those things. Why? Because I can code. So I can show people my status very easily. I don't need to buy fancy clothes and cars cuz I can show people that I know how to code and it everyone knows that I could get all those other things if I wanted to. And so I don't need those other things at all. So I'm playing the exact same social memetic

[1:04:32] game that everybody else is playing. It's I don't need I can play it, you know, I can I'm just at a different level. Uh, and I got lucky I think, you know, in it in it being able to play that. But it's not a coincidence that like Balaji and Naval and me like have a similar aesthetic, a similar life, a similar disconnection to society. We all know how to code. Uh, we all have lots of Twitter followers. Um, and we all have, you know, tons and tons of people who

[1:04:57] want who say they want to be like us. Uh, but the truth is they don't. Otherwise they would be. Otherwise they would be building stuff on the weekends and living in the middle of nowhere. But when you actually look at them and you're like, "Oh, no, you actually like they'll be like, 'Oh, I really want to be be you.'" And I'll be

[1:05:10] like go to their Instagram account. Like, you definitely don't want to be like me. Like, you're posting pictures on a boat. Like, I would never do that. So, like, they want money. They want other things. They want Whatever Whatever things that they think I may be able to, you know, I have. But, it's a package deal, right? At the end of the day, you can only be jealous of someone if you want if you if you're willing to

[1:05:31] get everything that they have. And to get everything that they have, there's this big inertia that exists. Like, a lot of people might be listening to this and be like, "Yeah, like, I'd love to make something like Sahil's made, or I'd love to get as many Twitter followers as Sahil has, but there's inertia. What do you Like, you're obviously natural in the sense that you you're you know, you you've got a bias for action. So, you don't have much inertia. But, how do you recommend to people who don't necessarily have a bias for action

[1:06:06] to How do you stimulate that? I mean, I would say that the most important thing you can do is to force it, right? So, there's that scene from like The Dark Knight Rises where, you know, like the kind of the bridge burns, and he has to do the thing, right? I think that's You burn the boats, right? Like, for example, you want to start a company, you want to do a startup,

[1:06:24] move to San Francisco. I did. Work for a startup. I did. Again, like, the data is the truth. Like, look at what people have done. Me, Balaji and Naval, moved to San Francisco and worked at startups in order to start our own startups. And so, there are all these people who are like, "Oh, I really want to do that, but I have too much inertia. I have too much

[1:06:43] family." Then, leave. Move. The number one most important thing by far anyone can do who's listening to this is literally physically change your location. By far, because that will sever all of these things in your life that are preventing you from from from moving forward. Um so, you know, just move. Like, physically move. Um and if you can't do that, just be okay with not moving, which means not getting all of these things that you think you want, but you actually don't want because your family is more important than those things. And that's great. I I'm I wish I wish that family was as important to

[1:07:19] me as it is to them, but it's not. It just isn't. Um that might be due to childhood trauma. That might be due to genes. That might be Who knows why? That may be due to socialization. Um but that's just the truth of of of who I am and the things that I get to do um because of it, you know? Like I don't mind working 60-plus hours a week. I love it, you know? Um when I go on holiday, like I wish I were working. Uh Guess what? If you are on holiday and you're like, I love being on holiday, I'm sorry to say that like, you know,

[1:07:51] doing a startup is probably not for you, right? Um but better to be truthful about that than to to say, "Hey, you can like Here's a million bucks." And then like 4 years from now you're going to realize that this is not for you cuz guess what? Like the the company only matters 10 years from now. That's the other thing. A math teacher told me this one time where I was like this is math, right? Math very key. Here's a good mathematical concept, um which is like uh I think I I I got close to doing something and I'm like, "I got 80% of the way there. So like I should get like

[1:08:20] an 80%." And he's like, "Cool. Walk 80% of the way to the door." And so I do and he's like, "Are you out the door?" And I said, "No." He's like, "Yeah." So in math, for example, rule of math, uh fractions don't exist. They don't exist. There's no proof of fractions. You have zero and you have

[1:08:40] one. That's it. There's no proof of half of anything in real life because if you have half of something, then you just have one of that half, all right? You only have one. Uh and that was a that was a a super important concept. I think there are so many people right now. I I see it in my portfolio, to be honest. I see founders and I'm like, "You're you're going to keep doing this thing and you're going to realize it's not for you in 2 or 3 years, and do do something else, you know? Like I'm you're 11 years into Gumroad, right? Like 7 years into

[1:09:06] Gumroad it was a failure. Um and the only reason I kept going is cuz I knew how to code. Because I could run the whole thing myself, which means I could automate the entire thing and go do other stuff in my life. Which gave it the time to actually thrive. So, if I didn't know how to code, you wouldn't be listening to this today. Gumroad would be would be dead, you know? Like there's so many instances that this this stuff has saved has saved me. And that's the thing is when you look at Facebook and Twitter and all these examples of like oh, what the all

[1:09:30] there are all these other rules all these other things. Like yeah, but like basically they all died. Like in the in the instance that Elon didn't know how to code, Tesla would have died, you know? In the instance of Naval knowing not knowing how to code, AngelList would have died. Like the amount of near deaths that these companies have is incredibly high, and basically the only way that these companies exist is because the people at the top are insanely competent and self-reliant. Um because the truth is when these things become near-death

[1:09:56] experiences, everybody leaves. Everybody gets off the boat except for you. You're by yourself. Uh basically you're by yourself. Uh the hardest decisions I look at Gumroad, I was the only person in the room making them. Uh you know, I'm sure this the same is true with Steve Jobs at Apple and Naval at AngelList and Elon at Twitter. Like you're the only person who thinks this is a good idea, you know? Um and the only way that's possible is if you are literally possible

[1:10:22] to you you can do it by yourself. Um like Elon knows how to make rockets go to space, I believe. Uh not because he wants to, but because he has to. Like he has to know how to do all those pieces. Um So, that that that that I think goes back to, you know, your point around like inertia is like you have to you you have to want it so badly that like there's like you wouldn't even frankly you wouldn't even be asking the question, right? Cuz you would have already done the thing, right? Like I I I I love writing science fiction and fantasy. I was talking to Brandon

[1:10:50] Sanderson about this, and he said, you know, like the truth is like the people who write science fiction and fantasy and do it really well, they can't do anything else. And the fact that you want you have a choice that you this is something you do for fun, you're probably never never going to be able to do this at at

[1:11:04] this level. You know, so I think I mean that's a interesting Okay, I've got a I've got a few thoughts and then we got to got to wrap up. Um I love ranting, so thanks for letting No, no, I I this is you're you're you're going to push a lot of people's 2023 I'm trying to be more honest. No, I like it. I like the honesty and like even if you you know, people only agree with 70% or 80% of what you're saying, I think that the fact that if you're listening to this and you're kind of like questioning things, it's it's still an

[1:11:36] important exercise to do for yourself. So, you might not want to physically move for whatever reason, but you know, another you know, one thing I recommend people do if they can't physically move is mentally move. Like mentally move in the sense of like, okay, you still live in you know, Portland, Oregon, but like, you know, you follow or you consume content from people in San Francisco or something. Like I also was one of those people. Like I I left where I was and you know, in Canada and moved to San Francisco. And like this conversation with you is like one of the reasons why I loved being in San Francisco cuz like

[1:12:15] I hope you don't take this as like offensive. Like you're crazy like in the sense of like you're you've got big ideas and you've got crazy ideas and they're bold and stuff like that and like I had never met people like that until I moved to San Francisco. Yeah. Um so I think that like having like you know, what's the saying? Like you're the average of the five people you spend time with. Well, you know, you know, you're the average of the five podcasts you consume is maybe another way of of of putting it or the five Twitter accounts that you follow religiously or the five YouTubers or So,

[1:12:50] I think the media you consume is really really important. I think that's a an important piece that you're you're you're kind of I I know you believe in as well. Yeah, no. I think you're really right. And when I you know, I grew up in Singapore and like, you know, before before I was, you know, 18 and went to you know, went to college in the US, um, it was I was like that where I was like, I want to leave. I can't uh, currently. And so, I'm going to Twitter was my, you know, social network

[1:13:15] even when I was, you know, back then. Like, I'd go on Twitter every morning and I'd be like, these are all my friends that I don't know yet. And then when I moved, you know, when I finally moved to LA, you know, I went to Startup School in San Francisco uh, to like meet those people, you know? Um, and it is yeah, it is crazy um, the way you speak and like I speak and like I'm I have so much confidence and everyone should totally like add layers of of like self-awareness into what I say. I'm I'm I'm conscious as of the things that

[1:13:42] I say as I say them and how I say them. Um, but I try to be but you know, like you you want to you you really want to surround yourself, your environment, you know, with with what you want in the future, right? Make your environment in the current look like the environment you want in the future. And if that means Twitter and the books that you read and the people you follow, you know, resemble that, um, I think that does help a lot. Um, and you can learn a lot that way, too. Um, I would say the other thing I would just add is like

[1:14:11] also don't don't worry about unfollowing people, too, right? Like, sometimes you do have to let go of certain things and, you know, I don't get to hang out with my high school friends as much, you know, as I used to. Um, and it sucks and I wish I could do more of it, but, you know, I choose I make certain choices and other other you know, some of my high school friends still hang out with each other every weekend. And I see them

[1:14:31] on Instagram, you know? Um, so I think yeah, at the end of the day you are mimetic, right? Like, you are going to be programmed by what you consume. And so, make sure that you're kind of consuming just like a diet. Like, you're consuming things that, you know, you are what you eat in a way, right? Um, I do I do think that is that is really important. I would say the other thing is like do stuff with these people. Like don't just follow people on Twitter but like what if you could work together on something, right? Like what if two of you like learning to code is kind of like going

[1:14:58] to the gym. Like it's it's work. It's like it's not fun in the beginning, you know, you're going to hit your head against the wall and if you could do it with somebody else or do it 10 other people or start a Discord or whatever, like that's going to make your life a lot easier, too, I think. Cool. Well, thanks for thanks for coming on and and you know, making our our brains explode and I think a lot of people are going to love this episode. Where where could people get more of you and add you

[1:15:26] to their diets? Yes, if you want to add add me to your diet, that's a good one. I'm on Twitter at shl. That's the best place to yeah, follow me. See what I'm up to. And you've got a great book. I've listened to it on on Audible called The Minimalist Entrepreneur. Definitely worth a read. I think your next book should be be called something like, you know, get to zero and it should be an AI book, AI plus automation book. Um I do have a I have a domain antiwork.com which is you know, that subreddit which

[1:16:03] is really funny. They have a the problem is that they have a very pessimistic view. I I try to be a little bit more optimistic but yeah, that's the goal. I always joke with people like the goal like entrepreneur by definition is someone who does not want to work. And so you you kind of build a company and hire the people so that you can you can make the judgment calls, you can make the decisions but ideally you're not you know, you're not moving the knobs and hopefully AI makes it possible so that more and more people get to

[1:16:30] experience what that what that is like. All right, man. Well, we're out of time. I'll see you I'll see you later. Yeah, see you later. Thanks so much again.

[1:16:44] Mhm.

[1:16:58] Mhm.

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